The festival runs May 9-12 at the Napa Expo, with Macklemore & Ryan Lewis kicking off the festivities on Wednesday, May 8. The Macklemore show is free to 3- and 4-day pass holders, and individual tickets for the show, at $29, will go on sale “at a later date.”

The first 700 Napa County locals to join the “Highway 29″ club will get $70 off, with details to be announced Feb. 2full details just announced: if you are a Napa County resident and pledge to walk, bike, skateboard, carpool or take public transportation to the festival, you will get a presale code for the $70 discount. The pledge also involves letting people from out of town crash at your house, and to “display kindness in the face of frustration and patience in dealing with the inevitable hiccups of a first-year festival.” (UPDATE: After just an hour of signups, all of those 700 locals-only presale codes are completely spoken for.)

In honor of the Superbowl, 49er fans can use the code “GOLDRUSH” to get $49 off.

As of yet, no individual day tickets are announced, but based on what I know about festival ticket sales in general, I can predict that there will likely come a time when individual day tickets become available. UPDATE: Single-day tickets go on sale on Wednesday, Feb. 20. Individual day tickets are $129.

A full comedy lineup is expected to be announced in mid-February, and food, beer and wine will naturally be part of the festival as well.

The excellent lineup is a massive coup: Bottle Rock is being put on not by Live Nation, Another Planet or Goldenvoice but by two Napa locals, Gabe Meyers and Bob Vogt, who had a hand in the resurrection and reopening of the Uptown Theatre. Needless to say, it’s a huge deal for Napa.

There’s so much fraud in the world—MonaVie juice, “i-Dosing,” Michele Bachmann—that when I come across purity now I almost don’t recognize it. In that vein, I’d hesitated to listen to Mount Wittenberg Orca, the online-only collaboration by Bjork and Dirty Projectors with a lovely cover photo. I was afraid it’d be forced. It isn’t. Rather, it’s one of the most unaffected, honest things I’ve come across all year.

Or is it? As my correspondent Dean Tisthammer points out, the mountain pictured on the album cover is clearly notMount Wittenberg in Point Reyes National Seashore. You can view the real Mount Wittenberg here. This might just be a slight misunderstanding, I thought. Surely, they’re referencing some other Mount Wittenberg? But alas, the explanation from Dirty Projectors’ Dave Longstreth:

Amber from Dirty Projectors was walking along a ridge on Mount Wittenberg, north of San Francisco. She was looking out at the ocean and saw a little family of whales, as you sometimes do in April on the Northern California coast. I wrote some songs about it and sent them to Björk, who agreed to sing the part of the mom whale. The songs became Mount Wittenberg Orca.

So the album’s called Mount Wittenberg Orca after the Point Reyes mountain, but with an imposter mountain on the cover? No love for the real Mount Wittenberg? Just what the bejeezus mountain is pictured?

Dean, a huge Dirty Projectors fan who hikes often in the area, says it’s Black Mountain, near Point Reyes. A Google Maps search confirms it—the photo was evidently shot just off Point Reyes-Petaluma Road, east of Point Reyes Station. Which seems to indicate that Longstreth & Co. googled “Mount Wittenberg” for a cover photo, didn’t come up with anything (we barely did either), and settled for some other mountain in Point Reyes, assuming it’d glide past the eagle eyes of nature-hiking Dirty Projectors fans.

Kudos to Dean for the tip.

Fake representations of mountains aside, the album is short and sweet—those enamored with Medulla‘s vocal-heavy arrangements will especially be smitten. You can download it on a sliding-scale donation basis here. All proceeds benefit the National Geographic Society’s ocean initiatives, too.

Little things trickle into my life lately and then so quickly trickle away. Rushing like mad through the brain, cogitated upon, reacted to, processed, and ejected. Could someone please sell me the key to the unused percent of the human brain? I’m willing to pay for storage.

Last night, after a movie at the quaint and wonderful Cameo Cinema in St. Helena, I grabbed an enormous, beautiful leaf off the sidewalk. I put it on the dashboard in the car. For at least the 30-minute drive home, it didn’t slip out of my life.

Today, I offer a Hefty cinch-sack of little things that have trickled in.

1. The Goodman Building in St. Helena, right across from Cameo Cinema. Take a look at it. Isn’t it amazing? I flip out every time I pass by.

2. For that matter, the Empire Columbia Building in Los Angeles is on the favorites list too. I have only seen it in person once on a special pilgrimage at 2am, and never knew that beneath its amazing clock, there sits a pool.

3. My favorite local DJ Max Wordlow has put up a new vinyl mix at Ofad.com. It rebuts the theory—commonly perpetuated by those obsessed with the mainstream—that hip hop is somehow “dead” when in reality you just gotta dig. Let him dig for you.

4. Speaking of Ofad, this article by Eric Simpson about the making of Disposable: A History of Skateboard Art is essential reading for anyone who owns the book or its recently-released expanded edition, which in itself is essential reading. Just, actually, stop what you’re doing. Go here and buy a copy. Your life will be better.

5. The chorus might not deliver venomously, but I can imagine this song becoming fantastic “break-up mixtape” fodder. Why aren’t there more songs about hating bands? Are we all too nice that we can’t call a spade a spade?

6. Here is a 1986 news item from the San Francisco Chronicle about a teenager who crashed his car, was pinned immobile, and was forced to listen to Wham! on his tape deck for six hours. Of course, the reporter didn’t ask the question we’re all wondering: Was it Make it Big or Music From the Edge of Heaven? ‘Cause that makes a big difference.

7. If you’re not going to see the Dirty Projectors at Bimbo’s on Sunday night, why not? Those who didn’t bring a signed form from their parents for the field trip can console themselves with this new song from the upcoming Temecula Sunrise EP (not to be confused with the Can Make You Laugh Sometimes EP, which only exists in my mind).

8. Like many children of the 1980s, I wanted to dance like Michael Jackson. And yes, if asked, I would have gladly taken part in recording this song called “I Want to Dance Like Michael Jackson” for a classroom instructional dance album.

Dirty Projectors are a band from Brooklyn who’ve just released Bitte Orca, a highly rewarding and stylized piece of music that’s one of my favorite records right now, and unlike anything else I’ve heard—with the exception of other records by Dirty Projectors.

Rise Above, the band’s previous release, came promoted with a high-concept backstory, a fact I only lately discovered but to which I pay little heed. I became enamored with it not for any ostentatious artistic process (apparently, re-creating Black Flag’s Damaged album from memory) but for the highly unusual end result. After all, until that point, I had never heard a man desperately yowling about being beaten by police officers over Ali Farka Toure riffs while a chorus of girls sang timidly in the background.

A friend of mine recently remarked that Bitte Orca is “everything I wanted all the other Dirty Projectors’ stuff to sound like in my head,” and I know what he means. Sharper songwriting and structure are only two of the reasons I replayed Bitte Orca three times in a row when I first got it; it also has a needed variety, with backup singers Amber Coffman and Angel Deradoorian taking lead vocals on a handful of tracks with a gut-hitting sonic depth. (Suddenly, for example, you can hear the bass guitar.)

Recalling Talking Heads’ meteoric public impact, opinions on Dirty Projectors are extreme and disparate. So it’s no wonder that David Byrne is a fan, even appearing with the band at Radio City Music Hall earlier this year, or that Bjork, who joined them at Housing Works Bookstore Café in downtown Manhattan the same week, shares the fascination. Even the freeway gods have gotten involved—last month, the band’s tour van flipped over on the freeway outside Detroit—and a long line of people down Divisadero outside the Independent in San Francisco tonight hoping for last-minute tickets represented locally the worldwide craze for the Weird Little Band From Brooklyn That Could. I truly had no idea what to expect live. Are the girls on the record cover even in the band?

Longstreth and Deradoorian took the stage opening the show with “Two Doves,” a lovely ballad, before the full band came out for Orca opener “Cannibal Resource.” Yes, the girls on the record cover are in the band, and a third helped out with harmonies like pitter-pat hailstorms (“Remade Horizon“) or R&B jams (“Stillness is the Move“). Tight and polished from constant touring, the band was locked in and fluid. Liveliness is an asset; Longstreth, who plays his guitar backwards, left-handed and with no pick, doppelganged a hulking presence around the stage on the balls of his feet, and basically said nothing to the crowd other then a rote “Hey, how ya doin’? Awesome.”

The crowd stayed silent, adding to the weirdness, but probably they were just asking themselves: Is “Stillness is the Move” the motherfucking jam of the summer? Why do guitar players need to play with huge amps when tiny Fender practice amps get the job done? Do drummers ever worry about “the Battles effect” when they place their crash cymbals up high? Is the Salt Lake City look the new thing? What’s with people who buy New Age CDs when they could simply listen to “Rise Above” over and over for enlightenment? Remember that one girl? The one who always tucked her shirt in the back of her high-rise jeans but not the front? Whatever happened to her?

Here’s what happened to me: I played Bitte Orca so many times in the last couple weeks that the songs began to sound normal; I’d anticipate all the quirks and idiosyncracies of the songs, like a roller coaster I’d been on twenty times. But seeing the songs played live made them wonderfully mysterious and bizarre all over again—mystery that you can dance to, I might add. So bring on the fans. Here’s to Dirty Projectors’ flight out of their artistic nest and into the real world; especially since their world still contains Gary Moore and the Andrews Sisters.

About CSI

City Sound Inertia is the North Bay Bohemian's multiple award-winning music blog, founded by Gabe Meline and now helmed by Bohemian staff and contributors.Read more...